


some great machinery

by orphan_account



Series: AU: all those gears and arteries [1]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, android gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 19:50:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4032481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where DYAD creates androids instead clones, Sarah is tested as an impulsive decision sends her face-to-face with an android who wears the same face. Upon meeting Sarah, the android appears comes alive and is willing to change everything to meet Sarah. Continuation of android AU on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> STOP! If you have not already, I highly encourage you to read the "backstory" on the notes on this AU. It will be confusing otherwise.
> 
> I was raised up believing I was somehow unique  
> Like a snowflake, distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see  
> And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be–  
> A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me
> 
> But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be  
> I’ll get back to you someday soon you will see 
> 
> \--HELPLESSNESS BLUES, Fleet Foxes

The day after “the glitch,” as DYAD called it, demonstrations continued as scheduled. It was a Thursday, and people were beginning to collect in the grand halls, whispering of twisted futures–of A.I’s gone wrong.

To them, the only thing more fascinating than success was a fantastic failure. Helena was a lion in a cage. Beautiful as it is behind Plexiglas, they wanted to see the horror of its escape and the sickly pool of blood that would collect beneath its body after being put down.

A new caretaker guided Helena into the room and prepared her before the crowd.

One alteration they had made with their demonstrations was pushing upfront the fact that Helena was not human. Make it her best quality, they said.

People wanted to see where DYAD accomplished human likeness, but in order to show that, they needed to see where the design was infallibly artificial. (Within a margin, of course.) Everything was charted out with these people.

It was a boost of some sort for people to see a creation so elegant revert into its inferior form.

The caretaker trailed a dark finger over the edge of Helena’s spine and whispered something into her ear. At once, Helena’s eyes rolled beneath her lids and caught the crowd’s attention; her body leaned forward stiffly as the control panel opened from her back.

The caretaker pried the panel wide and wheeled Helena around so that her open back faced the crowd.

For commercial purposes, DYAD had decided not to install an external trigger for Helena’s PowerSave mode. It was too clunky and outdated. Instead, a combination of touches and sounds that the owner could set himself acted as the trigger. (Just make sure it’s not in your daily vernacular–she’ll go into PowerSave every time!)

The distracted whispers from the audience dampened as each of them fastened their eyes on the sleek arrangement of steel cords and dials before them.

“Good morning,” the caretaker said, “we have quite a different demonstration for you today.”

More people began to collect, streaming in from all sides, hoping to catch sight of the machine.

Stretching her wide lips, the caretaker cracked a smile of pearly white teeth (in this, each caretaker was the same: polished, perfect). She had a microphone attached to her blazer, which projected her voice across the hall, and raised her arms to command attention.

“Our goal is to design a product for everyone. Helena has settings here that can be programmed to fit the individual. She can be extroverted or shy; she can be sexy or smart–you name it.”

Her fingertips danced across the machinery as she spoke, altering things as she went.

“It doesn’t harm her a bit–come close, look at her eyes,” the woman said, “She’s dreaming.”

The crowd awed dutifully and watched as Helena’s eyes flickered beneath her lids.

“We programmed impulses specific to the PowerSave mode, which mimic those of a person in REM sleep.”

(Helena dreamed of a child over and over again–the flutter of brown lashes, the edge of an origami bird, a soft cheek brushing her lips, the taste of salt–she would touch the child’s face and feel her heart swell with–something, something.)

“When you’re done, just close the panel and she will reboot.”

Helena woke with a start and gasped at the amount of people watching her. The image of the girl clung sleepily to her mind, though distant, she joined the image of the woman she’d met yesterday–they clicked in like pieces of a puzzle.

She scanned the crowd as she had done the day before, but had only a specific pair of eyes in her mind–which, a whole day later, still burned holes in her vision.

The cold press of fingertips against her inner elbow brought her back, faintly, and drew her attention back to her caretaker. The woman’s smile glittered with the same masking smile the other caretaker had worn, but her eyes were cold; they were black coals snuffed out by a frost-bitten night.

“I must have fallen asleep,” Helena said finally, blundering through DYAD’s pre-approved line for that evening. At the words, the pads beneath her cheeks tinted a rosy pink.

She could almost connect with the feeling, the flushing heat, for she hadn’t been aware of their plans to undress her before the world–to remove the sinew of her skin and reveal her gnawed-bone innards, the gnarled mess of forced life–what was the word?

Her innards felt like they could’ve boiled a rubbery pink, like her cheeks,

sort of. It felt more like–

something.

The crowd just laughed, and laughed.

* * *

After the “glitch”, Sarah had kicked herself awake from that hateful obsession–whatever it was, it had been consuming her life and destroying her clientell. There were lives to con, things to sell, drugs to push–it’s no wonder why DYAD had wanted her face; there was no place she could be but in the darkest corners of the city.

It made her clients restless, though, seeing her face so impressionable onscreen; she’d begun keeping a switchblade in a sheath around her ankle, just in case.

She never attended another demonstration, but she did have a kid who owed her a favor, Felix Dawkins. He was a dark-haired boy of 19; though he was pink-cheeked and bony as a cat, he had a crafty way about him–and he always had something snappy flapping between his lips.

A month after the glitch, he barged into her studio and threw off his jacket with a scoff.

“That place reeks of privilege and formaldehyde,” he said.

“Yeah?” Sarah grunted, checking her phone.

She sat on the backrest of an old mahogany chair and kept her boots on the table.  

“Your _sister_  was a total mess today,” he said.

“Not my sister, Fee. A computer.”  

“Yeah, well, they fried her brain this time.”

Sarah kept her eyes glued to the phone screen. But her lips pursed gently. Just get to the point, please.

“They’re going dark after this week. Regular maintenance, they said, but Helena kept mumbling about some girl. Then–get this–halfway through she starts scratching at her back. I think she was trying to put herself in PowerSave mode.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Yeah, well, A.I.’s are weird that way. Word has it, investors are dropping like flies. Your sister might get the boot.”

An image of the scrap yard filled her mind. It was the place where all of DYAD’s failed prototypes went–and you could find them, if you looked hard enough. DYAD often disfigured them beyond recognition, pretending that their “foundational models” rested in some underground museum for further testing. But she had found a first generation A.I. that still had a portion of the identification stamp embedded in its frame: “BETH.” She sold the whole bit for a smart phone.

How many prototypes lay abandoned there? She could imagine Helena, severed by DYAD’s destroying hand, laying strewn in piles of sparking veins and synthetic flesh. Her eyes, still gleaming weakly, are all that remains visible in the darkness. That, and the eyes of her sisters, all vacantly collecting data until their final power source dwindles.

She didn’t care, not really. It’s just that she hated when owners abandoned their belongings–living or not.

* * *

_It wasn’t a glitch. It wasn’t a glitch._

She paced the edges of her cage, eyes flashing. Two caretakers stood post on each side of her cell, watching vaguely, occasionally taking notes.

“I’m not glitching!” She yelled at them, but the caregivers only stared in their disinterested way. The ends of their pencils whirled in the air as they scribbled down her every word.

DYAD decided that the source of the problem wasn’t in the calibration of her settings, but in the source of the data itself. So they stopped letting her dream. They figured a few weeks without calibration could be easily fixed, and her interest in–well, everything–would go away. A perfect solution.

Her room was barren of all potential triggers; an empty egg-shell, cracked open.

The worst part was that it was working: the face of the girl was slowly fading from her mind–and the woman, her eyes no longer burning, was but a shadow in the corner.

Memories for Helena were like fresh flowers–vivid, colorful, tangible–until the first tinge of rot, and then they were dumped out and replaced with a new bouquet. This was done to keep her ever-learning, while irrelevant memories were left to decay, but now it was being used to erase her.

The woman with her face was growing more distant; a well of blood sealed by scar tissue.

Helena swung her arm behind her head and traced the split skin along her shoulder blade, hoping to trigger a fresh memory–or trick her body into PowerSave mode–but it was useless.

The pads of her fingers were stained black by the tar of her fake blood and the skin felt rubbery and cold beneath her fingertips.

She was losing herself, slowly.

A body of blue light rose from her shoulder and scuttled noiselessly down her arm, its stinger dragging from behind.

“Relax, Helena,” whispered Pupok. “Keep calm.”

Helena took a few deep breaths and felt the spritz of energy begin to taper off.

“If you keep up like this, they’ll keep you locked up here and you won’t get calibrated.” 

“I don’t care,” she muttered. 

“Well, you need to if you ever want to get finished.” 

She glared at Pupok and shook it off her shoulder. It crawled in lazy circles on her leg and crawled onto her hand.

“I am finished, Bug,” she muttered. She splayed her hand before her eyes so that her fingers stretched wide, and then she curled them slowly into a fist. Pupok crawled over the white-tips of her knuckles as she said, “I feel strong.”

“Strong and sane are two different things.”

Pupok was intentioned to be an educational program for beginners who lacked the finesse required for handling technology. A hologram projected from minuscule LED lights embedded in her skin, an idea easier said than done, as it turned out.

No one knows how it came to be a scorpion; its appearance had not yet been designed. There were rudimentary models for its body–a butterfly, a dragonfly, a bird–but Helena listened more than initially thought.

It was supposed to be able to talk, but all that comes from its airy mouth are waves of static (for all but Helena).  

Last time she let Pupok out, they talked about disabling the program entirely–so usually she would keep it within her skin, invisible to the human eye–but now there was no point.

Helena glanced at the men outside the glass and pursed her lips.

 _“_ They just want me to forget,” she said.

“A couple dreams aren’t worth the scrap yard, kiddo.”

“But I don’t  _want_  to forget,” Helena whispered, watching as Pupok crawled over her knuckles.

“Better than dying, isn’t it?” Pupok said.   

Helena said nothing, but traced her pointer finger over the wispy light of its body. Her metal heart ticked in intervals, bringing rhythm to the slow intake of her breath.

She remembered those initial days: the slow crush of demonstrations and flashing cameras; constantly being guided from place to place, forced into PowerSave while they tampered with her personality; watching the epileptic flashes of the woman’s dreams with an ever-deepening boredom.

Pupok squirmed under the depression of her thoughts, and its image waned. After a moment, it flickered with new strength and hissed out a sigh.

“Fine. Let’s go, then.”

* * *

The slow  _whish-whish_  of the fan decorated the room with cool air. It had always had a calming effect on Sarah, she believed because she needed the underlying white noise in order to sleep–but the fan had a particularly pleasant constancy to it.

She lay over her covers with heavy-lidded eyes and watched as the fan head oscillated in a half-circle. Over her stomach, her fingers splayed lazily in tapped rhythms, occasionally dipping below her navel. On the edge of her mind, she toyed with several undeveloped thoughts–a tangle of family and strangers, of monsters and victims. 

DYAD had been silent for more than a week, which meant nothing good. The billboards still flashed with Helena’s image, but they were beginning to look worn, in need of replacement. 

When a second whirring sound accompanied the other, she felt the presence at once. Her eyelids slipped close as she let her hand trail from her stomach to her bent leg. Breathing steadily, her fingers twitched over the handle of her switchblade at her ankle.

But when she opened her eyes, she found two steady eyes before her–and nothing else. Faintly luminescent, they glittered like fireflies in the darkness. Her heart skipped several hard beats, and then rocketed high in her chest.

Helena stood before her in a dark green parka and leather boots, which would have made her look normal if not for the waves of color stretching across Helena’s skin. She went from sickly pale, blushing pink, to feverish violet in a moment, and then back again. 

Fluid though these transitions were, they were fast-paced and nonsensical. She could hardly imagine the jumble of Helena’s mind.

With both hands shoved deep into her jacket pockets, she seemed to be searching for something, and within a moment procured Sarah’s phone. 

She fiddled with it silently until her Sarah’s voice projected through the room:  _Hey, it’s me. You know what to do_. It was her voice-mail. 

Helena played it two more times, then she said something in an odd accent and made a low sound at her throat that  _could_  have been laughter, but was too muddled to decipher. 

Sarah was too busy slipping out of bed to decide either way–though, she may have heard the word _sister_.

( _Hello, sister._ ) With the blade slotted between her fingers, Sarah rose to her feet.

She made sure to speak with a level voice.

“Helena. Get out. Now.”

“We’re British,” Helena said, continuing delightedly with her off-key accent. “What’s our name?”

Her voice was hyper-frenetic and seemed to be leaning more heavily into mania with each second. 

Sarah’s gaze flitted to the door on the far right, which had been dutifully locked again, and then to the stretch of floor leading to it– _shit, it’s too dark_. 

“How’d you get here?” She asked, softer now, hoping Helena would align with the change in tone.

“That would spoil the surprise, dear sister,” she said. Then she looked around the room. “Where’s the girl?” 

Sarah bit her tongue, but she felt the distinct taste of bile rising in her throat. It tasted of rage _._

“Come closer,” she said, “I’ll show her to you.”

Helena felt something constrict around her metal brain–tight like a rubber band–and it was almost enough to collect her thoughts. Almost: a faint thought echoed in her mind ( _what are you doing?_ ) but faded quickly beneath the orchestra of clogged machinery.

Instead, she ducked her head and tucked a smile into the corner of her mouth.

When she drew near, Sarah lunged forward and grasped Helena’s shoulder, jerking her body forward. The blade plunged deep into Helena’s side and struck a hollow vein, reverberating across her innards in aching memory. 

Sarah slipped from Helena’s grasp and sprinted toward the door, but Helena met her there.  _Fuck._

She panted faintly, masking the door with her crouched body. Her hands became claws on the floor as she drew up her haunches. 

A blue-white scorpion rose from the dark crook of Helena’s neck and hissed a stream of piercing white noise. 

The last thing she noticed was the underlying sounds her body made as she swayed forward. The valves of Helena’s hearts opened and closed in sputtered rhythms:  _whish-whish, whish-whish_. 


	2. Planned Obsolescence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Just a lonely radio  
> Just a makeshift show and tell  
> Playing out the lives of the lost and found
> 
> Give me faith and give me love  
> Afaining from the clouds above  
> The sea below lent strings to bow  
> If I can’t jump just push and shove.”  
> – “Lost and Found,” Johnny Flynn

## The Return [6 weeks dark]

Exiting the train, Sarah lingered a while underground, breathing in the cloying fumes of piss and sweat as she waited. When she still met with clients, her days were spent like this, worming through the sewers of the city–the scrapyard, the subway–until someone’s rat came to meet with her; there would be a transfer of some kind, dope or money, and then she was free to do as she pleased. But she hadn’t met with a client in four weeks.

Lately, she would catch herself in the middle of waiting without knowing how she’d begun, or even what she’d been waiting for. It was like a dream she couldn’t shake; she’d succumb to it, meandering the streets in search of something indistinct, only to blink and find her day had rotted beneath the hours she spent wandering, heavy-lidded, with limbs of sludge.

A telescreen had taken the spot on the back wall where a spongy billboard once stood with dog-eared papers skewered to the rotten wood. The screen was fitted into the wall with two embedded speakers so that it looked like a mini-theater.

It played a few 60-second clips from Topside’s “BraveWorld” products but otherwise displayed digital versions of the billboard advertisements–until, that is, a new clip from DYAD flickered on screen.

When its logo appeared in all white, she heard someone suck their lip between their teeth and realized that a crowd had begun to collect around her. For them, DYAD had been dark for six weeks; to Sarah, it was closer to four.

It was a four-minute clip featuring a radial bone and the plum fingers of a “DYAD associate” whose body stood offscreen. They turned the bone over once, and then again, allowing their audience to view the bone’s hollowed center. It came with a detachable epiphysis, which the hand held between their pointer finger and thumb–it looked like a bleached skipping stone.

“As with humans, this end piece will not fuse with the shaft until the bone’s fully mature,” the caretaker said.

DYAD’s first week of silence had been called up for maintenance–regular tune-ups and quality tests, they said, nothing unusual– but they had been well into their second week by the time Helena appeared in her studio. And after that night, there was nothing. Not even a statement explaining their absence.

Without them, the billboards lost their luster, people grew desperate, some tried breaking in while others cooked up theories as to why DYAD had sealed their doors. The theories ranged from deranged to heroic and covered biowarfare, rogue androids, and zombies, But now, after six weeks, this was all they had to show? A bone? Where was Helena?

Sarah trained her ear on the surrounding crowd, listening for a name over the insect whine of new creations: “Where’s Helena?” But she never heard it.

There’s your answer, she thought, and felt dizzy. She leaned against the side of the building and felt as her innards swirled like sand in seawater.  The night she stabbed Helena, she’d heard a low groan–soft, despondent, resigned to pain–and imagined hearing it through the vents of one of DYAD’s underground labs. Did she make that sound when they tore her apart, limb-by-limb. Did she make any sound at all?  

Eventually she became aware of a shift in the crowd as people filtered out of the station, returning to their own lives with an inward smile, reassured by the comfort of business as usual.

At this moment, an android with her face could be screaming at nonplussed caretakers, knowing fully well that its life is ending; in a moment, it will be forced into PowerSave mode so that its bones can be melted and repurposed. Business as usual.

The demonstration ended and was succeeded by a few more “BraveWorld” ads, one of which displayed a new pair of prosthetic wings. She remained before the screen and waited for DYAD’s demonstration to begin again.

The bone had been printed with thermoplastics, sturdier than silicone but lighter than metal, so that it could act as a proper structure. The muscles and flesh were to be printed with more flexible plastics.

“Light as a feather in your palm!” The caretaker exclaimed, and closed their fingers around the shaft, “But sturdy.”

It was pocked around the edges where serrated drills had burrowed into the soft tissue and left pitted eyes.

The caretaker explained that all bones had holes in them so that “the good stuff”–veins, muscle, nerves–could be strewn through. Sarah imagined a telephone pole being strung up with electric wire; the first of many unliving things to come.  

They turned the bone again and pointed out a hairline fracture along the shaft where the printer had picked up on a detail created by one of their scientists. Sarah knew better and felt her heart pick up as a finger traced the spot where her wrist had clashed against jagged rock and twisted backwards, splintering like a chicken bone.

She’d jumped off a train, intoxicated by the nip of bourbon, and fallen straight onto her wrist, rolled to the bottom of a hill where she lay strewn, gaping at the star-speckled sky. For a half hour, she had refused to move, convinced that she’d broken her neck and that the faintest movement would cause the vertebrae to slip and end her life, or all feeling in her body.

Would the android be afraid of heights, as she now was? Would fear ever grip it so fiercely that it’d throw its head back, eyes peeled to the sky, as it suffered through the vulnerability of a trauma it never experienced? Had Helena ever experienced that? Did they ever bother to set a  fracture in her metal bones?

Or perhaps it was just an empty detail, like the pile of sticks and leaves that covers a hollow pit.

Sarah pivoted from the telescreen and pushed through the corridor, head bowed, arms crossed, bent against the current.

* * *

## [1 week dark]

DYAD had more than a measly radial bone.

A skeleton of plastic lay in anatomical position in one of their underground labs, surrounded by the bustle of scientists. In one corner, a pair worked to pull strips of flesh from the printer like taffy. In the other, the reactions of a bionic eye under different frequencies of light were being recorded.   

Not one person in that room could account for how long the project had been going on, or even who first designed it, as team assignment was rotated every couple of weeks to ensure a constant flux of scientists and engineers. Certain pieces were often exported outside the lab for an engineer at TopSide to inspect blindly.

This particular lab, unlike the one that bore Helena, contained no gnawing saws or melding pits. Similarly, no worming cord veins or cylinder bones lurked beneath its perfect flesh. Not a single scrap of metal composed its frame.

Though the body lay strewn in pieces across the room, there developed a sort of awareness. In small doses each day, the scientists activated its motherboard so as to import more data.

It was in these moments that the pieces of flesh and plastic, which previously had felt as detached as the surrounding plaster walls, became whole; it realized it was alive.

One day, as they inspected its bones, a finger traced down the column of its radial and sent the miniature gears and wheels that composed its eyes alight with agitation.

They dilated and contracted, appearing to stare at something beyond the glaring white light overhead. At once, they drew back, hands folding behind them, as they watched the android come alive. Their chagrined faces shone grey in the light, still shamed by the disruption of Helena’s failure.

Unknown to the scientists, a memory coursed through the android in a network of imagined tissue and nerves, alive with a paralyzing current:

She stared up at the night sky, pumping steam through the air, as the screech of the train steadily grew more distant. Her heart felt as though it had lodged in her throat and had now began trying to squeeze through her teeth. She dared not move.

Words appeared in phosphene images as though they were physically pressed upon its lidless eyes:  _God. Can’t move. I’m going to die here._

The next day, a scientist by the name of Ethan Duncan damaged the portion of her motherboard controlling her sympathetic response and returned to the fold of scientists, a hero.

* * *

## [2 weeks dark]

Nothing had gone right. She should have recognized the signs before her thoughts drifted too wide, but there had still been so much hope. Only when it was too late did she realize her mistake, and by then she didn’t care–her dreams had returned, dancing before her eyes as translucent after-images.

The woman’s pulse had tap-tap-tapped against her fingertips and woken her up. All at once, the room drew into focus around her. She saw that she held the woman’s arms in both hands and had already twined her body into a fetal position.

“What are you doing, Helena?” Pupok asked. (Actually, it spoke infinitely, as she’d been programmed to have unique responses for each personality based on factors that currently had no standard. Which is to say her personality shifted constantly, and therefore created innumerable outcomes for each moment) (Pupok also said, among other things:  _kill her, run, keep going_ , and  _brush her hair_.)

Helena dropped the woman’s wrists, wandered to the bathroom, and pulled out a pry bar from beneath the cabinet (this alone took a half hour as she trudged through a thousand contrary directions).

Pupok, give me strength, she thought and removed her shirt. She angled the edge of the bar so the teeth hovered over the nape of her neck. Then she plunged it deep into her flesh and wrenched violently until she felt the panel give way.

“You’ll never be able to reach,” Pupok said, “Get back to DYAD while you still can.”

“Shut up,” she muttered as the bar slipped from her grip, crashing to the floor with a loud ringing sound.

The rest, she doesn’t totally remember, though she could pinpoint moments of lucidity.

The woman had woken up at some point and padded to the bathroom; her eyes shone wide and glassy, mouth covered by her hand, with a scream choked on her lips.

A single voice rose above the clamor inside her skull, and she clutched onto it.

“You can’t stay here,” the woman said.

The pry bar now lay on the tile with a puddle of black tar oozing beneath it. She stared at it for a long minute, perhaps trying to gather her strength, until the woman’s grip closed around her elbow and scattered her focus.  

She looked at this woman who’d given her life with a look, knowing now that she’d been the one to take it away.

(DYAD had killed her already, burned her image in a funeral pyre and started fresh. There was nowhere to turn, only places to sink.)

That she’d acted so ghastly wasn’t the problem, she realized. It didn’t matter that the gears and spurs of her mind could malfunction, or that they would eventually corrode, but that she needed them in the first place. She could’ve knocked on the door like in the old movies, bouquet in hand, and been given the blade all the same.  

That was the fate of the android: to achieve human likeness; she was a mimesis and nothing more. 

Just as humans were created in their god’s likeness–adored for the similarity, but punished for the want of more. But they had become gods, they’d stitched her together in a cell of white, had been creating for some time. _Who will punish them for creating me?_  

The woman had guided her to the door, not unkindly, and reproached her with a pitying look. When she tried closing the panel, Helena shook her off and sent her a glowering look–I’d done that on purpose. (She knew her personality had shifted, was changing still, but she was too exhausted to make up for the difference.) 

Her mind was slowly fading again…

She struggled to capture words, even more so to find sense in them. How do they manage? With a world of words constantly orbiting their minds, they somehow manage to find the pluck the right ones every time–like fishing for stars.

“Can I–,” she paused to collect herself, “What’s your name?”

“Sarah,” she said quickly. Did it feel easier, less irresponsible, to share her name now, knowing that Helena would soon be dead? 

“Bye-bye, Sarah,” she said finally, and walked out the door. With her shirt acting as a barrier, she’d managed to keep the panel to her back open–so maybe she could still fix everything, later.

But by the time she reached the bottom of the stairwell, her mind had fallen into disarray; static replaced thought while garbled noise replaced her speech. 

She wandered diagonally through streets and blackberry thickets until the evening dampened into a sleek darkness. A shadow among shadows, she walked without destination.

* * *

## The Return [6 weeks dark]

Exhaust rose from the mounds of rubble in wispy clouds of smoke and inched toward the sky. Limbs of recently abandoned metal jutted from the piles like spearheads pierced through earth.

They had been an hour into their evening expedition when she spotted it: the smear of a person stumbling through the charcoal blackness. Except there were no people in the scrapyard, beside herself and Tomas.

Masked though it was by grime, she recognized it immediately. Creeping forward, she watched as it tore through the rubble like an animal in search of food.

“Hello Helena,” she murmured, once behind it, and saw that its panel had been pried open.

Upon noticing her, the android grew still, crouching like a chicken before the axe– _just make it quick._  

She pinned Helena to the ground, fitting her knee over its neck, and wiped coal dust from the flesh of her opened back. The poor thing must have opened it alone. How awful it must be, to feel your system fold into entropy. To know precisely how to fix yourself, only for it to have been designed out of reach.    

“Found something?” Tomas said, climbing over a pile of rubble. Sweat had matted his hair and then trailed down his face, creating clean vertical lines among the patches of dirt. 

When he saw Helena, he mopped his face with a starchy piece of cloth and whispered a passage of scripture between gritted teeth:

> _“Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.”_

“Relax, Tomas, she can hardly speak,” she said, petting its dark, matted hair.

Though the creature lay willfully, it held its mouth above the dirt and puffed out a soft breath at the touch. So it hasn’t unwound entirely, she thought.

The remains she’d found over the years would force any follower of DYAD to reconsider their purchases. Without DYAD’s artificial light, these androids quickly became listless and dull, unable to maintain that trick of life; she once saw one pull out its own eye, despite having so little left mutilate there among the remains.  

Tomas bristled like barbed wire at her usage of “she,” but that was typical. To him, faith was an iron-board from which he could make the world smooth and uncomplicated. This quality made him a loyal follower, but an ineffective leader–though he had initially drawn her into the fold, it was she who took the reigns.  

“May I take a look?” She whispered, crouching to Helena’s ear, and waited for another puff of consent before opening the panel. “Poor, poor, Helena. What happened to you?”

“Why don’t you kill it?” Tomas asked. He crouched beside them and looked with narrowed eyes at the dirtied machinery.

She pointed at the places where dials and gears had been set in constant motion, spinning to a chaotic rhythm, and where apparent black liquid flooded electrical cords in what should have become a war of elements.

“Cast a general eye over the inner-workings here, and you see the product of an irrational mind. An android that costed millions to create, which should have yielded years of profit if it had even an ounce of gratefulness, but instead was spurned into dishevelment.” She paused when she felt the body beneath her slump further into the dirt.

“But look closely,” she said, and pointed out a bolt at the top of the control panel. When she unscrewed it, the machinery shuddered violently, and then she loosened another one beside it, and then another.

By the end, Helena was howling, thrashing its head in the dirt, as it shuddered with a convulsion it couldn’t control. The shaking was a warning sign she’d helped design, and not one to be taken lightly. She removed the control panel entirely to reveal the layers of steel, which mimicked real bones, that sealed off its core.

Before continuing, she took a steadying breath while excitement knotted like hagfish around her innards. She hadn’t dissected an android in years. God, it felt good.

Tomas’ face had turned to sleet, perhaps with horror at such close proximity to an android or at hearing it scream like a human. His skin had become a sickly sallow paste, which drooped from his eyes like weights.

“Do you see this?” She asked, pointing at its steel core. All the cords were attached to the center, where a constant buzzing could be heard. “It’s a generator, and currently producing enough energy to launch a shuttle into space. Everything here–the electrical wires, the muddy water, the steel–is optimized to create hydrogen fuel.”

“That’s impossible,” Tomas said, but his voice betrayed a sort of awe.

“I designed it–the steel insulates the core reaction, the black water acts as a cooling agent, the copper wires help to produce the electricity that splits hydrogen. If you were to separate even one piece from the equation, the balance would be thrown. Essentially, you would be creating a bomb.”

“Then we must destroy it,” said Tomas.

“Absolutely not,” Maggie said, replacing the control panel to its original place. At once, the shaking subsided and Helena quieted into slobbering whimpers that mixed in with the dirt. She returned to the bolts, picked them like coins from the ground, and held them up for Tomas. They were clearly warped, and a size too small to contain the control panel.

“Initially, she looks like a failure, but her descent went exactly as designed. She sped up the process with disobedience, but she was never meant to last more than two years–four at most, depending on her popularity. Eventually, these bolts would wear beyond repair and customers would weary of the check-ups and calibration sessions. She’d need to be replaced.”

“With another android,” Tomas sighed, dropping his shoulders. A smile lifted at the corners of Maggie’s mouth.

“Our work is plentiful,” she murmured, “Be grateful for what we are given.”

“What are we given? Destitution, misery?” He muttered. The past few years had been weighty for them both, and cynicism appeared in pockets–first the glint of his eyes, then a hateful smile– on his haggard face.

“A flood,” she murmured, patting Helena’s hair once more. “And a powerful one at that.”

 

With that, she sent him to scrounge the scrap yard for bolts of the proper size, a couple strands of copper, and a few slabs of steel.

She would build Helena again, better this time–and pin the constant flux of her being on a single purpose–not even DYAD would recognize her.


End file.
